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LONDON — A mysterious new respiratory virus that originated in the Middle East spreads easily
among people and appears more deadly than SARS, doctors reported yesterday after investigating the
biggest outbreak in Saudi Arabia.

More than 60 cases of what is now called MERS, including 38 deaths, have been recorded by the
World Health Organization in the past year, mostly in Saudi Arabia. So far, illnesses haven’t
spread as quickly as SARS did in 2003, ultimately triggering a global outbreak that killed about
800 people.

An international team of doctors who investigated nearly two dozen cases in eastern Saudi Arabia
found the new virus to have striking similarities to SARS. Unlike SARS, though, scientists remain
baffled as to the source of MERS.

In a worrying finding, the team said MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) not only spreads
easily among people, but within hospitals. That was also the case with SARS, a distant relative of
the new virus.

“To me, this felt a lot like SARS did,” said Dr. Trish Perl, a senior hospital epidemiologist at
Johns Hopkins Medicine who was part of the team. Their report was published online in the
New England Journal of Medicine.

Perl said they couldn’t nail down how it was spread in every case — through droplets from
sneezing or coughing, or a more indirect route. Some of the hospital patients weren’t close to the
infected person, yet they somehow picked up the virus.

“In the right circumstances, the spread could be explosive,” Perl said.